Is that a cricket reference? I think I just made my first cricket reference. Anyway, my 100th short story, Midnight at Deadwood Station, was recently published in the anthology Horror on the Range (available via Undertaker Books).
I must admit, I never thought I would ever reach this landmark. Granted, it took me almost thirty years, but that’s still a solid 3.3 shorts published each year on average. My strike rate probably would have been a lot higher had I not drifted away from fiction for a few years in the middle there. I had given up my factory job which provided a steady but low income, and had to earn a living. Fiction just didn’t pay enough (still doesn’t), so I started writing features for magazines and did bar work on the side to pay my way through university. After that, I moved to China and started writing fiction again during the long, lonely Spring Festival of 2009, while snowed in my apartment in Tianjin.
By some weird twist of fate the first story I ever submitted also became the first story I ever had published. Monkeyman came out in a Welsh fiction magazine called Cambrensis in 1997. It was inspired by a quirky story I read in The Sun newspaper about an area of northern England being terrorised by a someone in a gorilla suit often spotted climbing up people’s drainpipes. He was probably either a peeping Tom or a burglar wearing a disguise, but might have been something worse, which is where my imagination went. Cambrensis was run single-handedly by a dear old chap called Arthur Smith. I think that early success had more to do with him feeling sorry for me than any real skill on my part, especially as I submitted the manuscript in BLOCK CAPITALS and the poor bloke had to re-type it all. Cambrensis was a labour of love for Arthur. I doubt he ever made any money out of it, especially because in lieu of monetary payment, the reward for publication was a lifetime subscription. As it turned out, the ‘lifetime’ in question was his. He died a few years later, and Cambrensis died with him.
This was the era of the small press. Genre magazines printed in small batches, which were kind of like fanzines for horror writers. Some were quite prestigious. Not many paid, but I was still cutting my teeth and just seeing my name in print was payment enough. Credits in Raw Nerve, The Asphalt Jungle, Roadworks, and others followed. But within a few years, the Internet would come marching in and give the industry a massive kick up the arse. The small press disappeared virtually overnight to be replaced by websites and the submitting process became cheaper and more efficient. Back in the day you had to type out a story on a typewriter, send it off to a magazine, (not forgetting to enclose a stamped self-addressed envelope so they could send it back) and wait several months for a reply. Sometimes the reply never came. Other times they wouldn’t send your story back, or they would but it would be all coffee-stained or crumpled and you’d have to type out another one. These days, you just end an email.
When I returned to the fiction fold after my exile, I had to adjust to the new landscape. But adjust we do. The world would be a very boring place if everything stayed the same. Looking back at my body of work, it’s possible to pick out trends and little threads tying them together which, with the benefit of hindsight, I can relate to where I was in my life when I wrote them. Some of my early stories, like A Thin Disguise, Another False Dawn, and A Hell of my Own Creation, are essentially about a young person struggling to find their place in the world, something I was doing a lot of at the time. A lot of my older stories are written from the POV of a lone male protagonist. That’s not me being misogynist. It’s just a reflection of a life lived mostly as a lone male protagonist. There is often sense of displacement, and not fitting in. Another observation I can make given some distance is that much (probably too much) of my short fiction is set in pubs or clubs. Painted Nails, Club Culture, The Cunning Linguist, and others fall into that category.
Naturally, geography has also had a massive impact on my work. I tend to write about my where I am living at the time. You can’t help but be influenced by your environment. Most of my earlier stories had a ‘small town’ setting, which I later gave the name ‘Wood Forge’. The Old Tip Road, What Happened to Huw Silverthorne, What Happened Next, Never Go Back, Hero of the Day, Where a Town Once Stood, and the Widow of Wood Forge, were all set there, along with many others. When I lived in China, that became my preferred setting. God knows the place is so weird it provided a lot of inspiration and led to stories like The Others, Roach, Surzhai, Little Dead Girl, The Wailing, Siki’s Story, and If You’ve Ever eaten Toad. Then there was the four years I spent in London, which comes with it’s own special kind of terror. Vicar on the Underground, Scary Mary, #Subject 270374, Gush, Sleepless, Holiday of a Lifetime, and Harberry Close were written, directly or indirectly, about my time there.
Finally, there are personal circumstances. Life is hard, and we all go through some shit. Some might disagree, but I have grown a lot in the past 30 years. Different places, relationships, jobs, experiences. Writing helps me deal, and a lot of the associated frustrations are filtered through my fiction. I doubt I’ll manage a hundred more short stories. There comes a time when we all have to stop what we are doing and do something else instead. But like I said I never thought I’d be able to write the first hundred, so we’ll see.
If you’re interested, you can find a full list of my published work HERE.
I periodically collect short stories into compilations called the X books. You can find the latest edition HERE.
cmsaunders 